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No More Anonymous Posting

We have decided to require registration before you can comment on your favorite Urban Semiotic blog. Spam has been increasing a lot lately and by requiring registration we are better ensuring we know who is commenting on our articles.

If you already have a WordPress.com account you don’t need to do anything!

Just make sure you’re logged in before you submit a comment and you’re good to go — the first time you post a comment after registering your comment will be held in moderation. Then, once you clear moderation, you will be able to post as you wish.

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Luck of the Land: How Agriculture Ruined the World

10,000 years ago agriculture was invented and in the midst of its successful evolution, the world was ruined because the fruit of the land — the wealth of our health — was held in a few hands instead of everyone’s.

America built its reputation in the world by being fresh-faced, fertile, undiscovered and undeveloped.

We fed ourselves first and then we fed everyone else and in that process our families split apart, people in the Homeland grew hungry and we lost the ability to individually feed ourselves with our own labor and the sweat from our own hewn hands.

There was a time — in the pre-industrial Age — when families would raise their own crops, hunt their own food and feed their own families. You canned food for the winter.

You hoped for the best against the rain and wind and snow.

The commoditization of sugar and cotton created slavery and the fertility of the land became more valuable than its people. Prosperity in the industrialization of agriculture was determined by the luck of the land and never again by individual familial hard work.

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Terror in the Homeland: The Fort Dix Six

I thought the whole reason we are slogging through the war in Iraq is to keep the Terrorists “there” and not “here?” That, at least, is the war drum President Bush has been beating and still beats. In a 2003 interview — published on the White House website — Bush makes it clear the Terrorists will remain “over there” as long as we stay there engaging them in Iraq (emphasis added):

Q: Well, what about the suggestion from your critics that while you won the war, the peace is being bungled? THE PRESIDENT: They’re wrong. We’re making great progress in Iraq. We’ve got a pretty steep hill to climb. After all, one, we’re facing a bunch of terrorists who can’t stand freedom. These thugs were in power for awhile, and now they’re not going to be in power anymore, and they don’t like it. And they’re willing to kill innocent people. Their terrorist activities — we’d rather fight them there than here.

 

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The Universal Guide for Textual Laughing

Laughter is a great salve against the pain within and threats from the outside in — but laughter can be hard to effectively communicate in a text form — so, to assist you in the release of antigens against the toxins, I have created: The Universal Guide for Textual Laughing. 

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The Uglier One

Ugly is everywhere. Some of it is visual. Most of it is internal. None of it is ever hidden.

A lot of it used to be punished via Ugly Laws. Some of the best Ugly Advice I was ever given came to me as a youngster in the form of punches to my face from a crew-cut boy two years older than me — but in my same fifth grade class. His name was Alex.

He was a bully. He wore a perpetual scowl.

He outweighed most of us in class by 75 pounds.

Everyone hated him.

Everyone admired his giant fists and punching power.

He was a brute in a boy’s body.

He was a boulder that gathered moss.

While the rest of us wore mop-top bowl haircuts, Alex waxed the ends of his crew cut and shaved the base of his neck every morning.

Alex imparted his reality to me in a flurry of blows to my face after I had taken the advice of my mother’s boyfriend to “stand up to a bully and fight him on your own turf!”

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